1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to online services and user interfaces therefor, and more particularly, to motion and gesture-based mobile advertising activation.
2. Related Art
Conventional online media business practices involve providing information or services free of charge or at minimal cost to the primary audience in exchange for being presented with advertising that is paid for by advertisers. As referenced herein, online media or content providers encompasses the Internet counterparts of traditional television, radio, and print news and magazine outlets, as well as search engines and other such aggregators, social networking sites, individual websites/web logs (blogs) and the like. Advertising revenue is understood to offset the costs of server maintenance, network bandwidth, and other technical operational aspects, as well as the costs for producing the content itself, including pay for the authors, editors, and various other personnel involved in production. Similar practices have been extended to software applications, particularly those running on mobile devices, which can be provided free to the user but subsidized by advertising revenue.
Advertising content can be integrated with the presentation of the primary content (news articles, application functionality, etc.) in various ways. One of the most common is the banner ad, which is a graphic designed by the advertiser and placed in a prominent location within a content page. Several technical solutions that achieve this functionality are known in the art, such as embedding the banner advertisement in-line with the content but laid out on the top, side, or bottom ends of the page, displaying the banner advertisement in a separate static frame that does not move when scrolling, and so forth. Besides static graphics, animations, sound, video and different interactive elements can be also be integrated into the banner ad. Clicking on the banner advertisement typically directs the user to the advertiser's website, where additional information and an opportunity to purchase the advertised product can be provided.
Other advertising presentation techniques are also known in the art. These include pop-up windows, floating advertisements that are overlaid on the content until some additional interaction, such as pressing a close button, is completed, and interstitial ads, which require a reader to view an advertisement before being provided access to the content page. These techniques vary in terms of obtrusiveness and effectiveness, and varying forms of online advertising can be deployed depending on the desires of the content provider, the advertiser, and the user base.
As these conventional advertising presentations are utilized more, their ubiquity has slowly led to a decrease in their impact and effectiveness. Most end users tend to regard conventional advertisements as boring at best, and thus are ignored. In many cases, the advertisements may be annoying as interfering with the viewing of actual content. Further exacerbating this is that while the aforementioned conventional advertising presentation techniques were originally developed for viewing on browser platforms with ample screen real estate such as desktop and laptop computers, the user base of mobile devices such as smart phones has been expanding. Thus, an increasing number of users are browsing Internet websites and interacting with apps on mobile devices, and hence being presented with advertisements on limited screen real estate. Whether implemented on content websites or software apps, existing advertisement presentations require modifications to fit within the constraints of the mobile device interface. These factors are understood to increase the annoyance factor, and contribute to decreasing value of conventional online advertisements.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for advertising presentations that involve more interactivity with the user, and is more engaging. There is also a need in the art for such advertising presentations to exploit the mobile device form factor and it ability to accept a variety of touch, gesture, and other types of inputs.